Non-Traditional Students and Inclusive Course Design

Non-traditional students are a growing demographic that is increasing.  Traditionally we considered college students to be between 18 and 24 years old and matriculating fresh directly from high school.  However, today's college students include:

• Parents
• Caregivers
• Full-time employees
• Retirees

With at least 40% of the current undergraduate population being non-traditional (CLASP, 2015), students in the classroom now face challenges that were not considered before such as:

• Social Isolation: The age difference or life experience difference makes non-traditional students struggle. That has significant impact on their success (Wyatt, 2011)
• Interrole Conflict: with multiple roles, non-traditional students have to balance the roles with that of being a student (Markle, 2015)
• Lack of Flexibility: Class times and course work schedules often do not afford flexibility non-traditional students require (Gonclaves & Trunk, 2014)

These general concerns do not even address many other factors, such as economic or race issues, that also may impede student success when not accounted for in higher education. For these reasons inclusive class designs and practices are needed to improve our teaching success.

A fun reminder that helps is that as a college academic, if you are taking the training, you are probably feeling the same pressures as your non-traditional students. Chances are that 40% of your students are feeling the same way you are, however, many may not have the flexibility or finances you have. 

While using Universal Design for Learning will not solve all the challenges non-traditional students face, it does offer a tool to help create learning environments that afford students the flexibility that can contribute to their success. In many ways Universal Design for Learning encourages accommodating environments to coincide with preferences of adult learners, such as allowing students to direct their learning (Wlodkowski, 1993).  By offering flexible learning environments, we are helping develop a more inclusive atmosphere that will contribute to the non-traditional students’ success. This is at least a step in the right direction.

References

CLASP (2015). [Table depiction of ‘Yesterday’s Non-Traditional Student is Today’s Traditional Student’]. Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success. Retrieved from: http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/publication-1/CPES-Nontraditional-students-pdf.pdf

Gonclaves, S. A., & Trunk, D. (2014). Obstacles to Success for the Nontraditional Student in Higher Education. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 19, 164-172.

Markle, G. (2015). Factors Influencing Persistence Among Nontraditional University Students. Adult Education Quarterly, 65(3), 267-285.

Wlodkowski, R. J. (1993). Enhancing adult motivation to learn: A guide to improving instruction and increasing learner achievement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wyatt, L. G. (2011). Nontraditional Student Engagement: Increasing Adult Student Success and Retention. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 59, 10-20.

Creating a Shareable Document that Demonstrates Universal Design for Learning Principles

Sometimes you want to create a document or presentation that can show your great content designs the employ principles of Universal Design for Learning and be able to share it with colleagues who may not be able to access your Learning Management System.  A PDF is a great way to do this. 

How do you accomplish this?

Word, PowerPoint, and many other Microsoft products feature the ability to save as PDF and preserve hyperlinks and other media (such as images).  If you format the documents, to include hyperlinks, they will remain active when the document is accessed via a machine with online connectivity. 

How can I do this with a web content document?  

In word, you can follow some simple steps.

1. Copy the text (and paste into a Word Document)
2. Be sure hyperlinks are included.
3. Add images (and be sure to add descriptions).
4. If you have embedded media, you can easily opt to add a screenshot of the embedded image (such as the video).  You can then add a description and a hyperlink in case the viewer chooses to select the image.
5. Use the Accessibility Checker to make sure the document is accessible.
6. Then save the file as a PDF while preserving formatting.

You should note that PowerPoint offers several similar options.

Now all you need is a little practice and you can create PDFs with hyperlinks to web-pages, as well as supplementary multimedia. You can email the files to students or colleagues. Finally, if you are emailing the content and using MS Outlook, you will have much of the same functionality as Word.  This means you could even compose the email message to include multiple representations of the content. You may notice that offering your content in more formats may increase the number of people who engage in your content. This is just an added perk of having a document to share that uses Universal Design for Learning Principles.  

Know Your Audience

Whenever you are creating a course or learning environment, it is critical to know your audience. First it is important to know what you want to you audience to accomplish.  As an experience college educator, you already know that if you were to create an introductory college course you would naturally want a course that enables students to:

• articulate general principles of the course topic,
• have a general idea of the field
• consider the subject from a variety of perspectives and
• apply an approach to problem solving employed by professionals in that discipline.

Alternatively, advanced level college courses involve higher levels of abstraction, a more sophisticated understanding of the content, and extensive knowledge of the field.  Consequently, knowing what level of knowledge the expected student has and the level of the course expectations gives you great insight as to what your course will need to be successful. 

Knowing your audience also entails understanding the specific needs of our students.  This will allow for courses to target resources to meet students where they need most help.  For example, if you create an online course and presume that the students all younger and younger people are digital natives who should not have a problem navigating the LMS, you may be in for a shock when you discover that 1 in 4 students in your class are over the age of 25.  Further, often low income and first generation students do not have the same level of computer competence as their fellow students. This can greatly affect your courses’ design effectiveness. It is best to know who your audience is and design it inclusively for the various students who will be attending the class.  While you may want to make it easy for those who are familiar with computers, you may want to remember you also want to accommodate those who are not.

Overcoming your perception of students and looking at the reality of your college is critical for understanding how to best meet your student’s needs.  For example, while most people think the average college student is 20 years old, the average college student is actually 26 years old.  Further, while more students enrolled in four year colleges (58%) than two year programs (42%), and half of these students attend full time, community colleges have generally have a higher level of part-time students than full-time students.  Hispanic students are also over-represented in public two-year colleges while less likely to attend a four year college and get a bachelor’s degree.  

Over all, knowing your courses audience is critical for them achieving success.  As an instructor or course designer, you don’t want to tacitly accept your intuition about your students.  The more you learn about them, the better you can accommodate their needs and increase their success. Ultimately, this contributes to higher retention, high graduation rates, and more satisfied students and administrators.  Of course, the better teaching reviews that are correlated to better course design doesn’t hurt either. 

Creating a Class List with Blackboard

You find yourself teaching a hybrid course this semester, and are faced with an enigma. Is there no easy way to create a class list to take attendance when in class and you do not have access to the LMS? Copying them by hand from a computer screen the night before doesn’t seem to be a practical solution. 

It doesn’t take a detective to unravel this mystery - there is an easier way.  By going into your course shell in Blackboard, you can create a class list that can be downloaded and printed with these easy steps.

1. Go to the Full Grade Center.
2. From the Work Offline tab, select “Download”
3. Select the “User Information Only” feature under data.
4. Select Submit
5. Press the Download Button and an Excel File will be downloaded to your computer. This may contain sensitive information, so be sure to be careful with this file.
6. Open the Download file. Excel will probably give you a warning box telling you that the file could be unsafe because of a file format extension mismatch. This is not the case. It is just reading a hyperlink in the file that no longer points back to your Blackboard shell that would retrieve the students’ last access date.
   
   To continue, press “Yes” and open the file.

You now have an excel file with a list of your students that are registered for your course.  You can format it to your liking and print it out. This can be handy if you want to have a hard copy for taking attendance in areas where you may not have access to internet or do not wish to open Blackboard.

This is an easy way to create portable class lists.

Now that truth is out, we can rest easy and get back to what is important – teaching.

Adding Accessible Images in Blackboard

When developing a course in Blackboard, or any learning management system, you should ensure that every image has an alt-tag, or description. This is vital for ensuring that everyone benefits fairly. With a description, those with visual assisting software, or screen reading technology, can make sense of the image. Without a description, visually impaired students will only be presented a meaningless string of characters. (For example: you could hear this instead of this)  Since increasing accessibility is key to inclusivity and student success, as we as the law, it is vital to add a description to each image.  Luckily, doing so is relatively easy.

You just need to follow these steps:

1. In the Content Editor, select the third button from the far left on the third (bottom) toolbar. This button has a picture frame with a mountain and sun in it.
2. A new window will open. An image box will be starred. Just underneath the box is a button that states “Browse My Computer”. Select this. It will allow you to search your computer and select the image file you want to use.
3. Now, make sure give the image a meaningful Title and Image Description. This is important because this is how screen readers can access the image and translate them for the visually impaired. This will make the image more accessible, which is good practice, and ADA Compliant.
4. Select the “Appearance tab”. Select an alignment for the image. In general, if the image is not too large, you should select “Right” alignment and place it on the top of the page. This will give the image visibility while not drawing away from the users navigation ability or the primary text. For manageable whitespace, consider have a Vertical Space of 7 and a Horizontal Space of 11.
5. Select the “Insert” button

Congratulations, you have added an accessible image.

Guiding Students with Online Discussion Tips

Many times teachers are challenged with new or non-traditional students who are not familiar with how online discussion work in education, as well as, some students who struggle within the online environments. Naturally, when some students do not make the most of the discussion sections, and this can impinge the overall effectiveness of the forum for the class.

Like most aspects on teaching and learning, a little preparation before the lesson can save the instructor a lot of work after student falter.  By offering tips to students in advance, you can assist them in better contributing in class discussions.  Alternatively, setting up an adaptive learning system, these tips can be set to assist students who first demonstrate that they may not understand how to maximize the discussion forums.

Below is an open set of tips (included in the video playlist above). Feel free to use these to assist any students you have that could benefit from better discussion participation.

A Boilerplate Course Model to Promote Quality

Imagine that you have a template that could assist you in course creation and allow you, as a developer, to focus on course content and learning activities that will effectively assist students in meeting the learning outcomes of the course. This could save you time one developing webpages and formatting them according to best practices.  Instead, you can focus developing assessments and learning activities to promote students easily meeting the courses learning outcomes.
The course model supplied offers a linear course design that implements a course information documents pack that meets over 20% (11) of the OSCQR standards. Using best practices this model template, when areas are completed, allows the course to meet over 40% of the requirements of the OSCQR rubric, or 21 of its standards.  This is true regardless of the subject matter used. A content free model cannot ensure that the course will meet all the standards, such as:

Standard 31: Course provides activities that emulate real world applications of the discipline, such as experiential learning, case studies, and problem-based activities.

Nevertheless, it can offer a template that ensures that several standards are met while saving the developer time and, if regularly adopted thought a school, offers a uniform environment for easier navigation and less cognitive load for students.   The numbering system also offers a convenient navigational system that is lacking in many conventional learning management systems

Doesn’t this interfere with academic freedom? 

No, of course not.  The course model offers a structure that conforms to best practices in instructional design.  Just as in logic in philosophy, there is a difference between content and form.  Thus Modus Ponens is a valid argument form regardless of the content. Moreover, the model is just that – it is a template to help in the design and development process. It may offer a linear format, however, this does not preclude that you can modify the model to meet pedagogical needs of the course. Provided these modifications do not run contrary to best practices in instructional design, there is no reason why the designer cannot add them.  For example, adding a course long discussion forum intended for students to share and evaluate external references related to course content is an excellent idea to build a community and promote information literacy.

Remember to work smarter and not harder.  There is very little reason to spend time working on recreating course structures, when instead you can spend the time working on developing assessments that map to student learning outcomes and great learning activities that promote student success.

You can download a Blackboard Package of the Course Model here so that you can upload it to any course that you plan to develop. You should note that some of the features are college specific, and will require further modification for use at a school other than SUNY Schenectady.

Creating Accessible PDFs with MS Office

You want accessible content because it increases student success. Luckily there is software that is common on most all campuses that can help. Microsoft Word, and most all MS Office Programs, have an Accessibility Checker that will allow you to create accessible documents. With both you can also convert your documents into PDFs so that they work better of online courses.

Here is how to create accessible PDFs in MS Word in 4 simple steps (and this can also apply to PowerPoint).

1.  Create a word document that is accessible with the “Accessibility Checker" 
2.  You simply have to save the document as a PDF.
   
   Saving a word document as an accessible PDF is easy.
   To save a file with the PDF file extension, either:
•  select “Export” and then choosing “Create PDF”, or
•  Select “Save as”, or “Save”, and changing the file type to PDF.
3.  Choose the “Options” button.
   
   In the “Option” pop-up window be sure to select the option, “Document structure tags for accessibility”.
   
   If you use more accessible fonts, such as Verdana, you should be fine. (You may consider selecting ISO 19005-1 Compliant PDF/A option if you have a non-standard font. It will ensure fonts can be read by a screen reader and not represented as an image (or bitmap). This option is preferable for creating documents that you would like to archive.)
4. Save the file as a PDF. 

If you follow these simple rules, you can ensure that your documents are accessible. You did this with only Microsoft Office using Word.

Help spread the word and increase the accessibility of content! Please feel free to share this information and end inaccessible documents.

Why Your Course Should Have a Linear Design

How to structure your online course can directly affect the success of your students and this structural difference is key to certain demographics.  In general, most college courses benefit from a linear structure because they are best received by their audience.  While some students may find a non-linear approach easier to find aspects of the course they are interested, as a designer, you should be concerned that a subset may miss needed components of the course.  Moreover, the structure may not relay any meaningful connections the content shares.

For example, imagine you are designing a course.  You create:

·       A folder for quizzes

·       A folder for tests

·       A folder with weekly readings

·       A folder with discussion boards

·       A folder with their current event assignments

·       A link to the publishers website for more material

Now, all the students have to do is read the 15 page syllabus to know what to do and find all the appropriate materials, and the course is done.

This design is easy for the faculty to create, but is not easy for the student to navigate. Determining what is due at any given point can be buried in a long syllabus and hard to find. The objectives are unclear or also difficult to find as well. Even if each folder has weekly headings, the students are required to constantly jump in and out of folders to navigate their learning in a meaningful way. To compound to this problem, there is no meaningful ordering or naming of the content to reveal how the content relates to each other.

Recipes include a step-by-step process precisely because they guide us though the process creating something. Shouldn’t course design be structured to guide the students through the process of learning?

The vast majority of college students taking online courses are not-self-motivated graduate students or post-docs, and several are new to the college learning experience. It is reasonable to assume that many of these students are not as highly disciplined. In schools with students new in online learning or educational technology or who have disabilities, e.g. certain community colleges have a rate as high as 1 in 4 who have meet this category, a linear model assists in their success. The lineal model also does not impeding other students’ progress. This is not true of non-linear models, as they often impede student success in all students who are not very self-regulated (McManus, 2000) and require extra guidance from the faculty over all for success with most students (Chen, 2002).

If you are designing courses for undergraduates, and particularly for students new to the college experience or that face specific learning obstacles, such as in community colleges, you should gravitate towards a simple linear course design.  It is not that a non-linear course design does not work.  You could achieve the same student success rate with a lot more work on your part as an instructor to overcome design issues that impede student understanding. However, isn’t adopting a design structure to do that work and contribute to student success what instructional design is all about?

References

Chen, S (2002) A cognitive model for non-linear learning in hypermedia programmes. British Journal of Educational Technology. 43(4) 449-460.

McManus, T (2000) Individualizing instruction in a web-based hypermedia learning environment: nonlinearity, advanced organizers, and self-regulated learners. Journal of Interactive Learning Research. 11(2) 219-251.